House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King (R-N.Y.) tonight called on U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice to resign from her post in light of comments she made regarding the nature of the attack earlier this month on a U.S. consulate in Libya.

Rice, whose name has been floated as a potential replacement for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, told NBC and ABC on Sept. 16 that evidence at the time suggested the attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were "spontaneous." Since then, President Barack Obama has indicated the attacks were, in fact, planned and are being considered "a terrorist attack."

"I believe this was such a failure of foreign policy message and leadership, such a misstatement of facts as were known at the time, and for her to go on all of those shows and to in effect be our spokesman to the world and to be misinforming the American people and our allies in countries around the world, to me, somebody has to pay the price for this," King told CNN. "I think we have to send a clear message and on such a vital as this, where an American ambassador is killed, whereby all the accumulation of evidence at the time, the presumption had to be it was terrorism. ... To rule out terrorism, to say it was not terrorism at the time, to me, was a terrible mistake to make, whether it was it was done intentionally or unintentionally, to show the significance of that, I believe [Rice] should resign."

The administration has been criticized by Republicans for its handling of the fatal events in Benghazi, Libya, and earlier today, all 19 members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent a bipartisan letter to Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides asking for more information about the "accounting" of the recent attacks on embassies in Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia and Pakistan, according to a letter published by Foreign Policy magazine.